The Longshot
by prosodi
Summary: Arthur holds up the die; he knows its exact weight, the way it will fall. He always thought he was a good gambler. Pre-Canon Arthur back story.
1. Part One

**I.**

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The first time Arthur comes out of the dream state he can feel the sweat dripping down his neck and behind the collar of his shirt. Since he went under the sun has shifted just the right amount, so that now he's in direct light and his leg is hot through his pants. He leaves the needle where it is in his wrist and looks over to Cobb who is sitting on the armchair that matches the couch where Arthur is spread out, one leg close to falling off the edge of the cushions.

Mal looks between them for a beat, and then hones in on her husband. "Well?"

"We're in business," says Cobb, which is when Arthur finally takes the needle out of his arm and shakes the feeling back into his fingers.

xxx

Arthur never remembers his father's gambling problem.

He remembers peanut butter and jelly week. He remembers their daring bus adventure, a can of generic coke resting between his knees. He remembers Halloween, a cardboard pirate sword and an eye patch made of construction paper. And he remembers his fifth birthday with startling clarity, the roar of the crowd and the pounding of hooves on the ground as countless pounds of horse flesh run run run. Sitting sideways on his father's knee and clutching at the small slip of paper, hands sweaty and the brim of his baseball cap shading his face from the blinding sun and making his forehead itch.

He doesn't remember the rest. That they lived off of wonder bread and off-brand peanut butter because his father lost a week's worth of pay on a college basketball game. That the bus adventure ended at the office where food stamps were handed out, the shame of it freezing his father's expression. That they never went again. He doesn't remember that his costume was pieced together from things laying around the house by his mother, whose mascara ran down her cheeks. That his father always, always put it all on the long shot.

His father was a terrible gambler.

Arthur isn't.

Gambling, he knows, isn't about luck. Or, at least, that's not all it is. And maybe his father has something to do with it, or maybe when he turned fifteen Arthur just got tired of walking everywhere, of being poor, but the point is: there's more to it than that. It's a numbers game. It's about understanding and tweaking the odds in your favor. Which is why Arthur is so good at what he does, why he can be perfectly sociable when he wants to be, why he does so many things right. He knows the system; one way or another, Arthur likes to keep the world rigged in his favor.

xxx

The next time he goes under, it's with both of them. Arthur follows along as Cobb runs him through it and Mal shifts little things and reshuffles the universe. Cobb is saying something about the maze, something about dreamers and pointing out things that couldn't really exist in the real world (and they're starting to notice, everyone on the street, but the three of them aren't really paying attention. Getting pulled down and drowned or smothered doesn't have much of a consequence yet except to wake up uncomfortable and off balance, like someone's shoved you mid-step). It's hard not to watch the world bend around them, and for someone who's usually so good at listening that should be a concern - but Cobb's said most of it before, he's too excited and is talking too much about things Arthur doesn't really need to know. Not when the dream is carefully shifting and shuddering, when they're walking loops and loops that couldn't logically exist.

It's a little thrill, and it takes him a while to recognize where exactly it's coming from. When he does finally figure it out, it fills his mouth with the taste of cheap racetrack beer and it makes his fingers itch. If he was the one creating the dream- he doesn't even want to think about what might happen, just suddenly wants to not be sleeping more than he has in his entire life.

Later, Cobb tells him about totems - which don't really make sense at all except in the barest terms, but Arthur pretends it does anyway. Because the loaded die is more than just something to remind himself of reality - it's something to rig the dreams with. It's a cheat. A gambit. It's a tether to keep from losing himself in more ways than one.

xxx

And truth be told Arthur doesn't have to cheat, because he's good. He's good in a way his father had never even considered. His father used to call him lucky. When he got older he started letting him pick horses and teams and numbers, ruffling his hair with his broad hand and telling everyone, kid's a whiz, he's my lucky charm. Almost never wrong, darndest thing you ever saw. Arthur was never lucky though, he was just smart. Quiet and observant and good with numbers. He knew how to play the game, knew how to break it down to its smallest components, manageable and neat. Arthur knew the odds before most kids knew their shoe size. He didn't have to cheat and he didn't have to be lucky, but the day his father handed him the die, his dry nicotine stained hands pressing it firmly into his palm, Arthur couldn't bring himself to hand it back.

That day he got on a greyhound bus and rode it half way across the country, to a big college with a well maintained lawn. To a better life built on impressive test scores and tireless focus, where people would call him ambitious but maybe too serious. Smart, but not terribly creative. Like an elementary school report card: Arthur is a very bright boy who needs to expand his horizons and try new things.

xxx

He can't say why it bothers him, but it does. And it shouldn't, because he knows the rules and this is what he's here to do, but it still rubs him a little wrong. The three of them are in an expensive hotel room with white upholstered furniture and soft white curtains. Mal had smiled when she'd opened the door, leading them inside. "Oh, very nice," in that rich accent as Arthur opened the kit and she and Cobb laid down on each side of the king size bed.

And now it's just him and them, except they're asleep and he's asleep but they're on different levels entirely and it makes him...uncomfortable. Five minutes on the clock first and it's the longest five minutes of his life (and somewhere, another layer entirely, it's the longest handful of seconds). In the dream, Arthur watches them sleep. He walks around the room, scratches the underside of his chin. He leans out the hotel window and looks down, down. Far below them, cars buzz along the street at night, their headlights pinpricks. It's a long way down.

The rules are the same here as anywhere else though. The timer runs out, Cobb and Mal wake up.

"What's it like?"

"Like this," Cobb says, a little distracted. He keeps catching Mal's eye and they keep grinning at each other.

"No," Mal says, shaking her head. "It's more abstract. It makes just a little less sense - and time passes slower there than here."

Which sounds unsettling - how far down can they go? -, but the look on Cobb's face is what makes Arthur okay with it. Because Cobb is staring at his wife like she's a bright star and he's smiling with just the corner of his mouth, like they're each other's best secret. Like Arthur can't see it everywhere in Cobb's dreams. In Mal's.

The second time they go under for ten minutes. It's all they have time for, and when they're done the hotel room lasts only as long as it takes Arthur to pack away the equipment before they all—

Arthur blinks back the sunlight, but doesn't rub his eyes.

xxx

Cobb is laughing, rubbing the bridge of his nose with the side of his hand.

"I'm serious," Arthur says, his brow is furrowed and the corners of his mouth are turned down.

"I know," Cobb says, one last short laugh, "You're always serious Arthur."

He can feel his expression slip into something even less pleasant, and he can't help it. He's a little too serious, after all. But it's important, and he's right, and Dom doesn't laugh often enough to warrant laughing now. To warrant laughing at him.

"It's fine. Look, we're getting results, you can't argue that. And neither can they. Which is exactly why they're going to keep paying us. We're getting results."

He doesn't say it's dangerous, because it's not. It's all a dream, after all. Arthur rolls the die across his palm, both hands in his pockets and shoulders tense, and he has nothing else to say.

Mal enters the room moments later, in a breezy skirt and bare feet. She's smiling wide and beautiful and asks if they're planning to stay inside the whole time. It's a beautiful day. Arthur feels himself relax, just the smallest amount, and Cobb is smiling again in an entirely different way. Mal is seven months pregnant but her stomach is as small as the day the two of them met. Outside the door a pier stretches into infinity over crystal blue waters, on the top of a mountain twice as tall as Everest. Her feet leave sand on the carpet and her skin smells like salt and tropical flowers.

xxx

Cobb goes down another level for the first time two days before his baby girl is born. Mal holds them steady on the edge, watching over both their bodies where they've left them, in the den of a brownstone house that is older and warmer than what she usually builds. It's only the third time Arthur's been two levels deep and there is this odd feeling of being perfectly at home in the world of it while still being utterly alien. The level itself is a sprawling garden with a high stone wall along the perimeter. He and Cobb secret themselves into a narrow box of hedges. Arthur checks his watch. They have plenty of time.

"You have five minutes and then we're back to Mal. Be careful," Arthur says as Cobb puts the needle in his wrist and lays down in the carpet-like grass. It smells sweet here. There are projections walking in the garden, smelling flowers, children playing in the fountain.

Cobb isn't really paying attention as he rolls his sleeve up well out of the way. "Relax, if something goes wrong we'll just have to stay here for a few extra minutes."

Which is true. If something happens and it doesn't work, or if Cobb can't quite handle every role he has to take by stepping into shared dream space alone, he'll just snap straight back here. Still, it makes Arthur uneasy, which makes him feel sick until he just starts to get serious and short and he says, "Be careful, Dom," like an order one last time before hitting the button. Cobb slides away.

Arthur stands and looks out over the garden, but he doesn't move farther than that - stays near Cobb and the case and watches the projections tilt through the maze of hedgerows and the straight planters of lilies and daffodils and roses. There are more children than Arthur is used to seeing in Cobb's subconscious - and he doesn't even begin to know how that works. If he's here and Cobb's below how is Cobb's mind is still operating on the level where Arthur can see it? He thinks that Mal would be able to explain it, she's better at this than he will ever be. The only reason he's even here right now is because everyone seemed to feel more comfortable keeping Mal closest to reality. Soon it won't be just the three of them.

The thought startles him more than Arthur likes to admit to himself and he looks back at Cobb stretched out on the grass in order to regain his balance. He puts his hand in his pocket and feels the weight of the loaded die. This isn't the first time he's known people who had kids, but this isn't like that. This is- Arthur can't really put a name to it, just that they spend more time walking through each other's heads. They spend more time tracking through dreamspace than the they do the house where Cobb and Mal live and work, that it's hard to think of them as just...people. People who are going to have a baby girl.

Cobb's shirt collar is flipped up awkwardly from how he laid himself out, and in two minutes between the heavy smell of the flowers and children laughing, it becomes unbearable to look at. Arthur bends down to straighten it and his knuckles brush skin. Cobb jerks awake like Arthur drop kicked him.

He snatches his hand away. "What happened?"

"I don't- am I early?" Turning on his side, Cobb clumsily looks at his watch and squints at the second hand. "It was going fine until-"

"I'm sorry. I barely touched you," Arthur tells him.

It's a day wasted.

xxx

Mal is on maternity leave a week and a half later. She's not technically on anyone's payroll but Arthur has her marked down as such, just like he marks down when they take vacation or sick days - although no one really takes those. Mal and Dom love their work too much, Arthur likes work too much, period.

It means that Arthur and Dom are working together, alone, for the first time since Arthur was hired, and it's strangely uncomfortable. Arthur feels like he's intruding, perhaps irrationally, and Cobb is still a little out of sorts: re-evaluating his life. They are both aware, almost painfully, of the fact that Mal is only a few rooms away, napping next to the new thing that is half her and half Dom. There's a tangible weight as they recline on the matching furniture, the empty settee another reminder.

They're both know that they are essentially working just to work. They can't really accomplish anything new with just the two of them. They've explored the possibility of a dream within a dream to very nearly its full extent, and frankly it isn't all that cutting edge anymore. Arthur has heard through the grapevine that a Russian private security firm is thinking about dipping their toes in. He doesn't think they will any time soon, there's no real need, and they don't really understand it. Still, it means that the second level is nearly passé.

But they're doing it anyway. Arthur's dream is something Dom designed awhile ago. He remembers distinctly the way that Cobb's fingers drifted over the curve of an arch, never quite touching the model as he taught it to him; the design based off of something old, classic, and European. It isn't his style at all, because he built it for Arthur. He'd kept most of Dom's original design, his only addition a snooker table. Some habits are hard to break. He plays sometimes when Dom and Mal are under, the solid clink of balls following their natural trajectory. He is never tempted to cheat or to manipulate the physics of it.

Today is different, though. He puts Dom under, carefully sets the timer, doesn't think about the fact that, technically, the machine isn't real. That it isn't actually doing what the machine in the real world does. He rolls the die in his palm. Five minutes. He passes around the table, studies the set up. Four minutes. He lines up shots, carefully, and misses. He walks back to Dom. Sits on the chair by his bedside and looks at his watch, unnecessarily. Three minutes, fifteen seconds. Dom's fingers clench the sheets, sudden, and his breath catches. This doesn't happen. Two minutes, fifty five seconds. Arthur's eyes are steady but his mouth is a serious line. There is a crease between his eyebrows. Dom's hands are still clenched, his forehead is beginning to sweat. Two minutes, thirty three seconds and Arthur can't bring himself to care that he is breaking protocol. His hand is on Dom's shoulder and he's standing up, shakes him once, hard, calls his name. Dom jerks awake with a gasp, sits up quickly and curls his shoulders in.

"What's wrong?"

Dom's breath is still unsteady and Arthur's hand is still on his shoulder, he can feel him shaking, "I fell. I broke my leg. Legs," he clears his throat, and sits up straight again.

Arthur's face is blank, and his tone is flat. He doesn't know how he feels. He takes his hand off of Dom's shoulder a moment too late.

"I couldn't snap myself out of it. We might need a buddy system."

Arthur is not thinking of how long the time difference between the first and second dream world is. He is not thinking about what would have happened if he had kept playing snooker. He is not thinking about the fact that it could have been him, or Mal, instead. He is thinking about changing protocols.

xxx

In the time it takes Mal to recuperate from the pregnancy, this is what he and Cobb have time to do:

First, they spend a few hours on just the top level, playing with reality to see how far they can push it before they have to run the maze, before either Arthur or Cob's subconscious has had enough of them and decides to run them down. It's happened before, given Dom and Mal's tendency to twist things when they want to - building hallways instead of using the door, raising bridges when they could just walk up a block and cross the one that's already there. It's not exactly comfortable, but the few times that Arthur shifts enough in the dream to warrant being dragged down (mostly by his projections, not Dom's - because he has a hard time thinking of ways to push the boundaries to the point that Dom's will come for him. He does it in the easiest way, takes things apart or omits them entirely. Creation, twisting what's there, is harder), the sensation fades quickly on waking and he just has to rub his chest a few times or touch the die in his pocket to reassure himself.

Though that's all something they've already known - that they can be rejected, shoved out by the subconscious itself. It's like being slapped awake, thrown out a door, but it's natural enough when looked at logically. It's finding the synthetic ways around it that are the puzzle.

"Well trauma won't do it," says Dom. He doesn't grimace though, because if he felt the pain from breaking his legs, he doesn't remember it since waking up.

They're standing on the sidewalk beside a busy street. There's a hotdog vendor. "The projections do more than that," Arthur remarks, flatter than he's really thinking and they share a sideways look.

Dom shrugs and steps off the sidewalk and into traffic. It's fast and Arthur make a sharp noise, goes to grab Dom's shoulder and drag him back instinctively, misses. He can just feel the texture of Dom's jacket before it slips out from under his fingers. And there's an awful crunching noise when the car hits and Dom goes flipping over the hood and bashes into the pavement. Breaks squeal and Arthur's still standing on the curb and it takes him a few seconds to realize that Dom's still there, laying in the street.

And for some reason he can't bring himself to run, just walks slowly to where Dom's bleeding all over. It's a dream, it's a dream. Dom doesn't say anything, just stares like he can't and twitches his fingers and Arthur looks around, spins in a circle. People are staring - fuck, not people. There's a roar in his ears and he's dreaming, he's dreaming. Arthur opens the trunk of the nearest car, finds a tire iron, and bashes Dom's head in with it. One, two, he raises it a third time and Dom is gone before he can bring it back down.

The world collapses around him as he's holding the iron loose in his left hand. Buildings explode and bricks fall into the street. There isn't any blood on the asphalt where Dom had fallen, only skid marks. As everything falls apart his own subconscious drags him under, and he wonders, briefly, what that says about him. He can feel indentations in his palm from where he'd gripped the metal too hard, right up until he wakes. When he does he just lays there, stares at the ceiling. Dom is up only a fraction of a second before him but seems fine. Stands up and scribbles some notes in a book resting on the desk. His left hand curls around the base of his neck as he thinks.

Arthur gets up, walks past him, past the room where Mal and the new baby are sleeping, into the guest bathroom, and throws up.

After that they start carrying guns in the dreams. They're the most efficient way, the quickest. It's difficult to get used to at first. Arthur forgets his. It's not like remembering your clothes or your totem or a deck of cards in your pocket. You have to create it, make it up out of thin air, remember something you don't know and make it part of yourself. The weight of it is alien. The pressure against his lower back uncomfortable. He wonders if it will always feel that way.

It won't.

xxx

The second thing they get to is this: they're walking along the Charles River Basin. Except not really, and the details aren't quite right - Dom didn't spend four years walking there like Arthur did. He doesn't actually know why Dom thought it would be a good idea to come here (unless it's some reminder for the both of them what Arthur's doing for them, some callback to the first time they took a walk here when Dom approached him for the job), but he does know that the discrepancies between Dom's memory of the campus and his own is making his head hurt a little. They walk up and down the water's edge without really saying anything - not anything important anyway. Dom starts to say something about the baby and Arthur stops in his tracks.

"Is there a point to this?" At first Arthur thinks he's asking about the layout of the dream, but once it's out of his mouth, he knows that's not all of it. He's never asked this question before because he thought it was obvious, but they've spent the past year and change exploring parameters and playing in dreams and, of course, there's a point to that mapping, but-

Dom stops and looks at him. "What's that supposed to mean?" He doesn't have his hands in his pockets. He looks straight at Arthur who looks straight back.

"Shouldn't we be running anti-intrusion tests? That's what we're here for, isn't it?" Not building houses and gardens and endless mazes. Not cheating physics for the sake of it. Cheating…everything. The gun is heavy against the small of his back and Arthur wants nothing more than to turn the loaded die over in his pocket, but he doesn't.

It's the first time he's felt like they might be about to get into an argument, the first time Arthur thinks he might be crossing a line instead of just reeling Dom back or making sure he doesn't do anything too… too- He doesn't like all the cheating.

Dom finally shrugs and scratches his temple with his thumb, the wedding band on his ring finger catching what little light is available from the overcast would-be Cambridge sky. "I've been talking to a company in California," Dom says, which is news to Arthur. "If we figure out a way to prevent idea extraction, they'll send us over some low level techs to run simulations on."

It should be a relief to know that he's not the only one thinking about these things, but instead there's just this sense of claustrophobia. Arthur says, "Oh, sure," and looks out over the surface of the water, the reflected university buildings not quite matching what he has in his head.

xxx

The only way to prevent extraction is to know how to do it better than anyone else. To know every trick, every play that could be made. Where secrets are kept and how best to get at them. They only have a few months to become pros at it, to impress their new bosses with their experience and their flair.

This means that they have to practice, a lot. Dom and Mal design the best mazes of their lives. They begin to sacrifice beautify for ingenuity, form for function. Their worlds begin to look more MC Escher than Frank Lloyd Wright as they bend their heads over sketches and models of things that would never work anywhere but in the dream. Paradoxes. Arthur teaches them to run cons, and they never ask where he learned. They learn to run, to be fast. To shoot back when they have to. They run simulations where Mal slips Arthur a piece of paper, a little secret scribbled down, and Dom looks for it. Or they run a random number generator and the mark learns it, remembers it and does their best to keep it hidden. It's not perfect, because they know they're dreaming. They know more than a real mark would. But it might be better - it's a damn sight harder.

The first time Arthur wakes up, turns to Mal, and asks, "Pigeons?", Dom seems surprised. Like he hadn't anticipated that he could be sneaky when he needed to be. Arthur wonders if he really seems that guileless.

Arthur's in his element, really. High research mode. Calculating odds and making contacts with undesirable people willing to sell secrets for money or favors. Gathering important studies and organizing their own haphazard research into something more professional, so that when they present their findings to the people in California they're treated with the respect they deserve. That they require.

For awhile Cobb finds the work exciting, a thrill in working with certain limitations, embraces the challenge. But near the end, when they are beginning to teach what they've learned, Arthur can see him getting tense and twitchy. The momentary rush of it fading, making him miss the unrestrained world of the pure dream. He watches him, careful. Phillipa is nearly two years old and Dom has responsibilities now.

xxx

Running strangers through the shared dream has its own set of challenges. It's not a perfect curriculum by any stretch of the imagination but it's worth it for the extra time spent cataloging and organizing and learning - every piece something the Cobbs can add to their papers, to the journal articles. Every new person they bring into it, everyone they teach the rules to, seems to come with their own unique set of issues associated with the learning curve. And Arthur's been doing it a long time, but the slow pick up of some of them irritates even him - never mind how Dom takes it. Mal manages better than the both of them, takes would-be security techs and company heirs through the dream. She designs mazes that look like sleek Dubai resorts, wilderness retreats, and talks them through the levels, somehow managing to keep everything balanced. They don't take anyone deeper than the first layer. For one, because it's not as stable, and for two because dropping down further doesn't really require an additional skill set. Not really.

After, when they've wrapped everything up and sent everyone home and gone over the data (with a ten minute pause while Arthur helps Mal make coffee and Dom goes to tuck Phillipa in for bed), Arthur says goodbye and takes off. It isn't until he's at the end of the driveway that he realizes that he's forgotten the files he wanted to take home. It's all numbers stuff, cleaning up the tallies and the logs so it makes sense to someone else. So he goes back, lets himself in, and slides down the hallway. Knows exactly where he left them: side table in the living room.

"Sorry, I forgot-" He stops in the doorway.

There's four minutes and twelve seconds left on the timer. Mal, barefoot, is reclining on the couch with her head on Dom's shoulder, her wrist up. The IVs run between their loose fingers. Dom's barely supporting his head with his hand, elbow jammed against the armrest. The whole house is quiet. There are empty mugs on the coffee table. A beep - the microwave marking the hour.

He stands there, all angles and corners, and then just turns and leaves without taking the files. Locks the front door and jogs to the car, drives six miles down the dark new York State highway and then pulls over on a patch of roadside gravel. He leaves the door open, the dome light in the car glaring through the windows. Arthur paces six steps away from the car, then six back and stops. It's a cool night and the small hairs at the back of his neck are prickling - overcast, no stars, just the smudged out glow of the moon overhead.

There's a buzzing low in the back of his head, the sound of white noise or hoof beats. Arthur thinks about kicking in the wheel well of his car and then changes his mind. Instead he takes the die out of his pocket and gets back in the car, holds it in his fist for the drive home and puts it on the bedside table before he lays down for what passes as sleep.

xxx

Mal is four months pregnant but he can hardly tell. Her behavior is more telling than her body, a hand coming up to rest on her stomach intermittently - a reminder or a reassurance. They aren't in the dream, and they haven't been since Mal found out she was pregnant. Ostensibly it's because they have other things they need to do. They need to organize their research. They need to find out what everyone else is working on and decide what they are working on next. They need to write research proposals and grant proposals. Really it's because Arthur doesn't think it's safe for her, not anymore. Not when he can feel the heavy weight of a gun at his back and a cocktail of chemicals flowing through him. He has morbid thoughts that the new baby, a boy, could be born with the same inability to dream that the three of them now share. In some way or another Dom must feel the same, because he's going on with it.

Mal and Arthur sit at separate desks and pass papers back and forth. There's a pile of paperclips on Mal's desk and a box on Arthur's. Dom is doing freelance architecture, scratching an itch as he hunches over a technical drawing, supplementing income. They do this every day. Mal sighs, stretches her legs out under the desk, curls her toes in before standing up. She's tired, they all are but she is especially. She stands up, walks over and lets her hand drift over Cobb's neck.

"I'm going to go lay down," she says. He turns his head so that she can kiss him and she does.

Arthur looks up at her, eyebrow quirked as she drifts over and sets a small stack of papers on the corner of his desk. "Don't work too hard," she says, brushes her lips against his forehead like it is the easiest thing. Arthur clears his throat, straightens the papers on his desk. She either doesn't notice his discomfort or is too used to it to care. When the door clicks shut behind her Dom makes a frustrated noise that draws him back to the present.

"I have to see this," Dom says, he's turned his chair around to look at him, right palm resting on the drawing. Arthur's eyebrows raise, the smallest amount, but he doesn't say anything. Just gets up, grabs the suitcase from where it rests high on a shelf crammed full of books and kitsch. Sets it on the table between the chair and the couch with practiced ease. He gets the feeling it's more an excuse than anything else but he doesn't fight it too hard, because if he did he gets the feeling that Dom would start sneaking away and doing it alone. The idea bothers him.

Dom is hovering behind him, close enough that Arthur can feel the edge of his jacket. "It's a library?" he asks, for something to say.

"Yeah," Dom says, reaches a hand over his shoulder and turns a dial, the cuff of his sleeve against the back of Arthur's hand, "it's a library."

xxx

They go from room to room, Dom looking for things Arthur has no understanding of. Still, he doesn't leave and go walking - sticks a few feet shy of Cobb's space, keeping him in his peripherals. They make their way from one cavernous room to the next. There are no bookcases, no tables with bankers lamps, and no ultra modern or overstuffed armchairs. Just sleek glass and steel and concrete, a strangely pleasant feeling of old and new. The whole dream is just room after room filled with a smattering of Arthur's projections and their indiscernible babble. Cobb leads him steadily up the floors until there is no circular staircase left and they come to a rest on the fourth floor landing. The whole level is just one broad swath extending to the exterior walls. No smaller rooms built in yet, only support beams and the same sleek floor that runs throughout. There's no one up here save the two of them and the sun coming in through the windows is too bright to make out the shapes of the buildings outside.

There's something unsettling about the emptiness of it, the fact that Arthur's mind just accepts the barren landscape for what it is instead of supplying it with a world outside the windows; furniture and whatever else is supposed exist on the upper floors of public buildings. Offices. Cubicles. Private research rooms and climate controlled store rooms for old manuscripts. Something. Instead, it's just him and Cobb pinwheeling slowly around the empty space. Arthur gets tired of it first - mostly because he doesn't know what he's supposed to be seeing -, and he moves back to the staircase so he can lean his elbows on the railing and look out into the empty space, sun from the skylights warm on the top of his head.

Cobb is moving across the gap, studying the curve of the windows. Arthur, attention fleeting, glances down between the lines of his fingers to the atrium floor. It takes him a second to realize what he's looking at and when he does he just stares until suddenly Dom is next to him, looking down too. Their shoulders are too close.

"It's not what I was thinking when they suggested a mosaic," he says, something in his voice expressing just how tacky Dom usually finds that kind of thing. "But I kind of like it." Arthur tears his eyes away from the brass inlay on the ground floor for a second. Blinks at the line of Dom's profile, his nose and mouth and the angle of his chin and throat. He looks back down.

There are streamlined horses reaching out across the bottom of the floor, galloping in a perfect circle - every beat and every footfall true to form despite the simplified gesture of the lines. "Why horses?" Arthur hears himself say.

Dom shrugs and turns his hands over in the empty air beyond the railing. "I didn't put it there."

xxx

They are late in the game, resting on their laurels, and Mal is so pregnant that Arthur is surprised she doesn't just pop. Unlike some women she doesn't put on weight all over; she just has a baby bump, like a television pregnancy. It makes her look disproportionate and makes him sympathetic. She is reclined on the couch with her feet up on the ottoman where Cobb is sitting, rubbing her ankles as he talks.

"Inception," he says suddenly, switches from small talk to business without any transition. Arthur is holding his tea cup to his mouth but his eyebrows are more than expressive enough for Cobb to read if he bothered to look up.

"It's the next logical step," he says, like a defense. Mal takes a bite from her grilled cheese. She's smiling that little smile she seems to have for everyone. Playful, but not mocking. Like she knows what he's going to say, but wants to hear it anyway.

"No one else has been able to do it," she says.

"No one else is as good as us."

Arthur clears his throat, not-quite-scoffing. Sets his cup back on the end table next to his sandwich. It is cut in half, diagonally, and it is getting cold.

"They aren't subtle. Did you see Van de Berg's research? He might as well have run through the dream screaming 'Ideas ideas ideas!'," Cobb says, looks up as he takes his hands off of Mal's ankles just long enough to wave them around. She tilts her head at him and the hands return to their proper places.

"Someone's going to figure it out though, and don't you think it would be better if it was us?"

Arthur knows that Dom is playing them, using Arthur's need to be on top of things and Mal's love of discovery, but he has to admit that Cobb has a point. It's the next logical step. They all know it, which is why half of their research proposals poke and prod at the edge of it. It's just that no one had been willing to say it until now. Because it's hard. Van de Berg may not be them, but he wasn't quite as tactless as Cobb pretends.

"It's going to take time," he says finally, picking up half of his cheese sandwich. He doesn't really like it. Grilled cheese makes him feel poor - young, but he eats it anyway.

"I know," Dom says, still looking down, thumbs rubbing circles over Mal's swollen ankle.

They're not talking about the months and months of testing, that's as obvious as 're talking about dream time. It's hard to keep people under for too long, Ten minutes, twenty, and then it got hard, people woke up; the dream got sketchy.

"We need a new formula," Mal says it so they don't have to.

"I'll look into it," Arthur says, by which he means 'it's done'.

xxx

Cobb and Mal work the legitimate avenues - they talk to university professors over the phone, get video tours of labs on the other side of the country. They've published some pretty legitimate research, and if the Cobbs are looking into inception then so should everyone else. But Dom doesn't want to travel, not with Mal so close to her due date and his two year old daughter climbing into his lap at every opportunity, coloring on the walls and putting her hand on the hot stove. Arthur picks Phillipa up under the arms and takes her out into the backyard when she tries to climb onto the back of the couch where Mal is attempting to do paperwork and participate in a video conference with some head of research in Delaware.

It's late summer and the leaves have all started to go yellow. He sets Phillipa on her feet in the grass. "Go play," and nudges her shoulder with his fingertips. She gives him this look that's straight off her dads' face, mouth in a downward curve and her eyes squinting, but brow not quite furrowed. Just concentrating on him, like if she stared at him long enough she could solve him like a puzzle.

Arthur looks back at her, chin on his chest and his elbows tight against his sides. "Well?" He nudges her again.

"Do you want to play with me?" Her voice is screechy and tiny as she's shifting around in the grass, not quite still, all rubber band joints and pale hair curling around in the breeze.

"I have work to do."

And maybe it's just what she's used to hearing lately, but Phillipa takes it and goes trudging barefoot over the grass, kicking a soccer ball with all the grace of a washed up jellyfish. Arthur looks back through the open door. He can hear the hum of Cobb's voice: "No, no. It has to be something we can administer to ourselves independently of the somnacin-"

His phone buzzes in his pocket. Arthur goes digging for it, sits down on the porch step as he answers. Cobb and Mal work the legitimate avenues; the other side is left to him. The less than reputable man on the other end of the line says, with far too much smarm, that he's been digging around. That he knows a guy who knows a guy who might know someone. Arthur fishes a pen and a receipt out of his jacket pocket. He writes the number down.

"Now, I think this warrants a favor-" all smooth accent and charm that makes Arthur grit his teeth despite the three thousand mile plus distance from one end of the line to the other.

"Goodbye." He hangs up.

And Phillipa is back with the soccer ball. She kicks it to him and Arthur catches it under his shoe as he dials the number. Puts the phone to his ear and picks up the ball. He chucks it out into the lawn. Phillipa runs after it. The line buzzes. No one answers. Phillipa brings the ball back and he tosses it again. There's no answering machine, but he wouldn't leave a message anyway.

"What're you doing?" Mal asks, standing in the doorway. She has one hand under her swollen belly and the other pressed against the doorframe. She's tired and Arthur can tell she's a little put out with how long it's taking them to get this done. But at the same time her face is soft in the right places when she glances between Arthur low on the step and out across the yard where her daughter is fumbling to scrape the soccer ball out from under the porch of the playhouse that Dom built for her second birthday.

"Playing fetch," Arthur monotones, sliding his phone back into his pocket.

She laughs suddenly, full and ringing, head tipped back, and it makes his stomach tighten pleasantly. He's not exactly sure why, just knows that he rarely feels anything outside of foolishness when someone laughs at him; this isn't one of those times.

xxx

Mal has a son. He is beautiful and blond. Blonder than Phillipa if that's even possible. Otherwise he's more like his mother, softer somehow, with wide eyes and dark lashes. He's more agreeable too, Mal calls him 'easier', and says something about not getting that from Dom. She's more relaxed.

They all are. Everything is easier. Arthur's shady tip followed through; brought them to something that ended up being a lot more legal. Traced back the source and pulled strings and soon, soon they're going to be able to really get into it. Dom thinks they'll need a nanny when they start. Mal says that's silly, that she can have her mother come stay with them while they're working. There isn't an argument because nothing about them is typical. Less than a month and they'll be working on something new and groundbreaking, possibly impossible. There's an undeniable undercurrent of excitement.

Until then Dom and Arthur spend time learning the new formula, figuring out it's quirks, running tests. It works really well. The dream world is just overall more stable; even one layer down it's noticeable. There is a minor sedative involved that makes it easier to be unaffected by reality. Where things like the rumbling of a truck used to be enough to throw them off before, now they don't have to worry about even the sudden ringing of a doorbell (which on one memorable occasion had been disabled). For the most part it's ideal.

For the most part. Until the day that Arthur and Dom wake up from the dream, earlier than expected, and there are tears streaked down Mal's face as she stands over them, her hand in the briefcase, Phillipa is crying crying crying at her feet. Dom is up in a second, scooping up his daughter and asking, "What's wrong, honey why are you crying? Why is she crying?" as she buries her face in his collar.

"Her finger got caught in the door," Mal says, babbles something, barely intelligible and French. Remembers herself, says, "You wouldn't wake up," and Arthur can feel his heart beat, thump thump thump, as he stands there, because today it is just a finger but tomorrow—

And he isn't thinking about all the things that could happen tomorrow. He's thinking about protocol. He is thinking about the fact that a sedative makes the dream stable, but that there are side effects they need to take into account before furthering their research.

Dom takes Phillipa to the car and Mal grabs James from his crib, and the four of them go to the doctor. Phillipa is fine. There is a large bruise under her fingernail and the doctor says it will probably fall off, that it may grow back a little crooked but she'll be just fine. Arthur finds this out over the phone, in his apartment that has never felt like a home. He doesn't sleep.

xxx

Arthur is the one they send down into the dream. There's a few seconds of awkwardness as they individually work through the idea of Arthur going alone, and Cobb finally just says "It makes more sense to have an extra pair of hands here." It's not like Arthur was going to argue anyway. He just shrugs, pulls a face that's almost comically young - or maybe just more appropriate for how old he actually is - and sits down in the chair. They're in the middle of the kitchen with a pitcher of water waiting on the counter. A bullhorn. All of it's sort of ridiculously obvious, but without any starting point to build off they have to make one up. This is as good as a base line as any.

Cobb unwinds the iv and hands it off to Arthur who slides the needle points precisely into his upturned wrist, guided by the scars. Mal bounces baby James on her hip; he won't go down for his afternoon nap.

"Ready?" Cobb asks.

"Just try not to blow out my eardrums." He settles in the ladder back dining chair, the soles of his shoes sliding on the towels underfoot.

The last thing he sees after Dom pushes the compression flange is Mal smiling at him, shifting the baby onto her other hip. He only catches half of what she says - "He'll be careful, Arthur…" - and the next thing he knows, he's standing on a vibrantly patterned carpet, slot machines humming around him. Sound of coins. There's a row of televisions broadcasting dog racing from Florida.

Arthur gets a drink at the casino bar, drinks it with purpose and waits. At worst, he has an hour.

It takes time, but somewhere near the half hour mark, he realizes that the buzzing sound in the back of his head isn't actually coming from the speaker system or from any of the machines. He turns on the barstool and looks over the casino, trying not to actually look at any of the people playing the slots. He dreads recognizing someone. Bullhorn, he suddenly realizes.

Ten minutes later it starts to rain. Inside.

Arthur jumps the bar and sits under the ledge with the bartender who is wearing a red vest. He finishes his drink and steels himself to wait for the sedation to wear off, socks soggy, clothes clinging to him, hair going curly near his ears.

"Crazy weather, huh?"

He doesn't look sideways at first, stares at the strip of skin he can see between the end of his pant leg and the top of his sock. Slowly, he turns and looks at the bartender. His gin and tonic is loose in his fingers. "What?"

"I said, 'crazy weather,'" his father answers, "Your mother'll kill you if you ruin that suit."

Opens his mouth to say something - has no goddamn idea what - and the dream lurches suddenly. He thinks he might be sick and—

It takes him a minute to realize, but he's on the floor of the kitchen, still groggy from what's left of the mild sedative. He rubs his face dumbly and realizes he's wet, the dark blue dress shirt stuck to his chest. He starts to unbutton it and then stops, blinking up at Mal and Dom who are looking down at him, saying something.

"-thur, are you alright?" Mal is asking.

"I-, what did you do?"

"I pushed over your chair," says Cobb.

"After he slapped you." She's glaring at her husband, and if it wasn't for the baby Arthur's pretty sure Cobb would have a black eye by now.

"Well," can hear himself - voice all thick. "It worked." He has his arm under him, levering himself up off the floor.

They nickname it the kick for obvious reasons.

It works really well. They do a bit of legitimate testing, most of which, unfortunately, involves kicking Arthur's chair over. It makes sense, the spin of vertigo is like falling out of your bed. You never hit the ground in your dream. They hypothesize other things might work - you never drown in a dream either, but Arthur only raises an eyebrow and they all agree that it can wait until later. For now they have what they need to move onto inception. Mostly. Unfortunately it is clear they're going to need test subjects before they go any further.

They remember all their dreams. You can't remember your dreams and still have inception work. You can't really know too much about shared dreaming and have inception work. Which means that Arthur has more paperwork to fill out and Mal and Dom have more people to charm before they get what they really need. When they do, it's simple. A small advert at the back of the newspaper: Independent Paid Sleep Study. It's more than enough to drum up test subjects, mostly college kids looking for some spending cash. They carefully weed out the more unsuitable applicants. They all have different ways of dealing with the process. Arthur just hands them the daunting pile of release forms with a stern look and monosyllabic answers to their shaky questions, intimidating them with the sheer number of required signatures and how fine some of the print is. Dom goes in, guns blazing, makes it sound exciting and dangerous and is, perhaps, a bit intense for some people. They end up letting Mal handle most of the initiation process, her charming accent and maybe slightly low cut shirt making everything go a little bit smoother. She laughs away fears and reassures them and points to the little x's that need signatures or initials with elegant fingers.

They are building off of other people's research, which truth be told hasn't gotten very far. There is a fine line they have to dance, getting people to believe something hard enough to remember it when they wake up, but not being so forceful that it feels wrong. They start simple. They go in and have conversations, trying to guide the person to draw a conclusion. Then they wake them up and they ask them questions - how do you feel about this or that - based on the questionnaires until they get to the question they really want to ask. The person answers. Sometimes they don't answer the way they expect them to. Sometimes they do, but seem hesitant or change their minds. It never really works and they can only use each test subject once. At the end of the day the three of them sit down and devise new ways to try and get the result they want. They talk to the subject's subconscious, they leave physical clues, they tell a story. And none of it works. They have to take Dom off of interviews because he starts getting a little too intense, almost yells, "What do you mean you don't know? How can you not know?"

xxx

They are running out of ideas. It's getting frustrating, and they all know they've hit a wall. They have tried to plant more and more simple things, have polished the ideas down to the purest form, but still have no way to make a person believe it completely. There is always a seed of doubt and that isn't acceptable.

Dom is in the office cleaning up from the day's tests. Shoving blueprints back into tubes and ignoring the stack of filled out consent forms that are a reminder of how long they've been at this unsuccessfully. Mal and Arthur are on the back porch. They are drinking wine out of mismatched mugs as James naps in his converted car seat and Phillipa has a tea party with her stuffed animals. Arthur's knees are drawn up nearly to his chest, and Mal digs her toes into the grass. They are quiet in their own thoughts until she starts laughing, a sudden bark that turns into something longer, and Arthur can feel the corners of his own mouth turn up, huffs laughter out of his nose.

"Ideas ideas ideas," she says, sets her mug down and rubs her cheek. "Yelled, right in his face," she continues, trailing off into giggles.

Arthur is smiling wider than he has in a long time. For all of his jabs at Van de Berg, Dom's final solution hadn't been much better, standing in front of the test subject, practically yelling "You want ice cream!" in his face.

The kid had asked, surprised, "I do?"

"Yes, you do. It's delicious, and you want some," Dom had said, doing that scary eyebrow thing he did so well. Arthur and Mal had given each other identical looks as the timer ran out.

"It was something else. It deserves to be framed," Arthur says, a smirk in his voice, "And hung in a museum."

"That would be lovely," Mal hums, grinning through her fingers. They can hear Dom slamming books around through the window. They give each other another highly amused look as he opens the back door, leaning on the handle with his brows drawn low.

"Here," he says, throws Arthur's phone at him. He fumbles it awkwardly, and it falls in the grass before he finally manages to grab it.

"It was buzzing," Dom says by way of an answer, frowns at them again like he thinks they're conspiring against him. Mal grins back, bright, and the corner of Dom's mouth twitches before he goes back inside.

Arthur has the phone cradled between his hands, sees the number and presses the button to listen to his voicemail as Mal gathers up their mugs and heads back inside to talk to her husband. Arthur's elbows are on his knees and the knot on his tie is pulled low as he puts the phone to his ear. He watches Phillipa set her stuffed shark upright in its little chair as his mother's voice tell him that his father is dead.

xxx

Sacramento isn't exactly how he remembers it, but he's not honestly sure he ever had a great picture of it in the first place. Arthur moved a lot when he was a kid, lived in California through all of high school when he was too poor to own a car and was friends with people who didn't like to drive, didn't really like to go anywhere. So the memories are scarce even if the roads themselves are mostly familiar as the taxi winds its way to his mother's house where he unloads his small suitcase and pays the driver in crumpled bills. He hasn't been home for longer than a week since his second year in school which is when he stopped coming back for the summers. Hasn't set foot inside the house since his third. There were the prerequisite phone calls - birthdays and Christmases, sometimes a little late or sometimes a little early. Better if he got the answering machine instead of one of his parents – he could say Happy Birthday or Easter or whatever without the added weight of pleasant conversation. What he was doing at work and was he seeing anyone. Not much and no; since getting hired by the Cobbs', Arthur hadn't done much besides work. Its not something he thinks about either until his mother brings it up over coffee, sitting in the living room like he's a stranger or a visiting neighbor, "You're obsessed with your job. You should take a vacation, stay here a little longer."

He doesn't have a return flight booked, but the idea of staying in the house for long makes Arthur's skin crawl. It's too quiet and his mother, whose hair is going grey and whose hands twisted around the coffee mug, looks tiny on the couch across the room. "We'll see," he says. Except that all he can think about is that it smells dusty and he has dirt on the bottom of his shoes from stepping in a puddle in the airport gutter, and that the wall clock is loud. Since working for the Cobbs, he's gotten used to slick, flawless designs; the wallpaper looks old and tacky.

And he doesn't know what to say. His mother puts him in his old room, which has boxes and things that don't belong to him stored against the wall and in the closet and under the bed, but it's almost better that way than if it was pristine, perfectly preserved. She says goodnight, but Arthur catches her in the hall before she gets all the way to her room. He gives her an awkward hug with his too-long arms. "I'm sorry," and she cries a little with her hands over her face and her knuckles against his shirt.

He stays up late. Cleans all the dishes in the sink, finds a bottle of white zinfandel in the fridge. Drinks it out of a glass at first but then takes a few swigs from the bottle itself before putting it away - too sweet. Goes to bed at three in the morning when he's too tired to stand, he barely makes it to his room and lays down in the same clothes he wore on the plane. Sleeps on his stomach.

It takes a while to get things in order, but Arthur has gotten good at talking to people he doesn't know. Good at logistics. Talks to the funeral home director in blunt, unsparing terms with his mother sitting in the chair next to him.

"Do you want to see your father before you go?" the director, who has a long nose and crooked front teeth, asks.

"No." The thought of seeing him laying on a freezer slab is, right then, more frightening than anything else in the world. They go home and they watch television - which Arthur hasn't bothered to do in months. He helps his mother clean out closets and he goes through his father's desk alone when she's asleep, not really sure what he's looking for but unsatisfied when he doesn't find it. He books a flight for two days after the memorial service, says he's sorry but that he really can't stay longer. Arthur talks to the neighbors, talks to his mother's friends from church. It's the most he's spoken in the past year, possibly his entire life.

On Friday, a late model sedan pulls into the driveway and a young man holding a small cardboard box slides out of the drivers seat. Arthur assumes it's a pie or a casserole, more food to be wrestled into the overflowing fridge. He walks out to meet him, catches him before he reaches the step.

It's not what he's expecting. The man hands him the box, asks if he has the right family. Arthur answers with a mechanical, "That's right," and signs for it. He takes it inside and stands in the hall for a long collection of seconds.

The box is small, unassuming, roughly eight by twelve inches, feels too heavy. He opens it, discards the cardboard in favor of the unmarked black plastic container inside.

"Who was that?" his mother calls from the kitchen. The sink is running.

Starts to talk, has to clear his throat. "It's Dad," he says.

He calls the house that evening, doesn't think about the time difference until it's too late, apologizes when Mal picks up. "I'll be back on the twelfth," is all he really tells her and Mal doesn't say anything remotely close to 'You could stay' or 'Take a few days' which is the last thing he wants to hear.

Arthur says something at the memorial service, but later won't remember what - just that the microphone on the podium was broken and that there were more people there than he expected. He doesn't know how to ask his mother for what he wants, so he doesn't, and they bury the ashes in the church garden in a hole dug out of the ivy.

Cleaning house isn't something he's particularly good at, but he's okay at throwing things out, so that's the job he's given. He rolls up his shirt sleeves and takes bags to the garbage, stacks other bins in the hall so they can be taken to the Salvation Army when his mother starts being okay with it.

They clean and they eat cold casserole and lasagna, and on the day his flight leaves Arthur says goodbye early and gets a taxi to take him out to the racetrack. They're actually on the freeway, crossing over the river en route when Arthur decides it's a stupid idea. Tells the cabbie to just take him to the airport where he sits in the terminal and waits the extra two hours until his flight comes in.

He booked the cheapest return flight, one layover for about 45 minutes and then a straight shot back to New York. The layover is in Vegas, but there had been absolutely no reason for that to bother him. He hadn't thought about the first time his father had taken him there, or the second. He hadn't thought about the trip he had ducked out on during college. And he doesn't think about much of anything during the hour and twenty minute flight from Sacramento to Las Vegas. When he gets off the plane he is struck more than anything by the smell, or lack thereof. That is what he remembered most from his childhood memories - heavy cigarette smoke and cheap beer. Now it just smells like pretty much any airport, like the food court and people. He rolls the die in his palm as he checks the reader board, walks slowly to the terminal to prove he isn't running. 14C, twenty five minutes until boarding. He sits down, pulls his carryon up next to him. Taps his foot as he looks out the grand windows and watches a big plane take off. All around him the ambient noise is like some parody of the Vegas he remembers, the hum of people and the chime of fake coins from the digital slot machines causing him to recall the facsimile of the Charles River Basin. He pulls the die out of his pocket again, rolls it between his thumb and forefinger for a moment before tucking it back into his other pocket. He's scowling; he can feel the lines in his forehead, the tension between his eyes. His face smoothes slightly as he scrubs the palm of his hand over his forehead and tries to relax, as much as he ever does. He finally looks back around the terminal, taps his fingers over the handle of his rolling luggage as he takes it all in. Stands up and walks over to the row of small slots along the far wall, the click-clacking of the his suit case's wheels following him.

The seats are the same faded vinyl they've always been - flecks of glitter like gold, a promise of things to come. He fishes a five out of his wallet, feeds it into the machine. Slots are mostly luck. They don't take any skill beyond knowing how much to bet. Other than that it's a waiting game, deciding when to move on, when to stay, whether the machine is on a losing streak or just about to pay out big. He hits the buttons automatically. Here, wedged in the corner and surrounded by fading brass and the candy-bright sounds of the machines things feel far more familiar. The smell of faded tobacco that never quite washes out, buttons worn smooth from countless fingers. On the screen colorful pictographs click into line, one, two, three four, ding ding ding, the machine plays a cheerful song, simulates the sound of coins dropping into a trough. Ka-ching ka-ching ka-ching, the machine says, $10,000 jackpot. He stares blankly as the machine adds the numbers to his initial five dollars one at a time. A woman two machines to his left leans over, with a face that speaks of every year it had seen, gaudy bright makeup on washed out skin, and says to him, "You're a damn lucky kid, I've been at this all day and only won $40. The most I ever won in Vegas was $1,200. I won $2,000 once in Reno, though."

He looks at her, uncomprehending as the machine continues its payout. One of the assistants comes over to him, fakes a smile and congratulates him. If he wants to cash out, she can help him at the counter.

Ten minutes before he gets back on a plane to New York he is handed a check with $10,000 on it. He puts it in his wallet behind his gold card and thanks the woman automatically. He sleeps the entire flight home.


	2. Part Two

**II.**

**

* * *

**

He gets back to his apartment late and sleeps in longer than he means to. He left the bedroom window cracked during the night and the sound coming up off the street is barely a murmur. The apartment is too quiet without it and he doesn't like sleeping without some kind of noise. The hum of the television, of traffic, something low on the radio alarm clock that he forgot to set when he let himself into the apartment late the night before. After a few seconds, Arthur kicks off the covers and goes to take a well-needed shower, to brush his teeth. He doesn't stay long - closes the window after he shrugs on his jacket and before he leaves the apartment.

It's almost two when he gets to the Cobbs'; parks in the driveway and sleepwalks his way to the door, palming the die in his pocket. He lets himself in with the key under the turtle in the front planter and the sound of Mal and Dom talking at the end of the hall hits him like a ton of bricks. He has to stand for a second just inside the door, fingers touching one side of the loaded die. His chest is tight.

Cobb appears at the end of the hall. "It's Arthur," he turns and says to his wife, who Arthur still can't see. He starts down the hall, realizing how stupid it is just to stand at the door after he's let himself in, but before he gets there Mal is coming up for him. She takes his coat and folds it over her arm and she smiles sideways at him, soft. Instead of saying something like 'Welcome home' or 'We were waiting for you' she puts her hand on his back and says, "You look awful. Go lay down." Arthur is so relieved he could kiss her. Instead he just abides the hand on his back as she steers him past Dom and into the living room, forces him past the dining table and straight to the couch. "Go, go, we're finishing paperwork."

Arthur doesn't even care that they're exchanging husband and wife looks. He says hello to Dom, who says, "James threw up on the blue throw pillow, so don't put your face on it."

He doesn't. Spreads out on the couch with both feet on the ground in a last-ditch effort to keep himself awake. It doesn't work. He's comfortable for the first time in a week and a half and can barely think straight from relief, too aware of the feeling of the familiar couch cushions and Dom and Mal talking about inception and dreams within dreams. The silver suitcase is on the coffee table and they'll wake him up when they're ready. It isn't like falling asleep in his mother's house, or on the plane or even in his own apartment. It's easier.

Later, he figures that he must have been asleep for fifteen, twenty minutes. From one beat to the next, he goes from nothing to everything. The back door slams shut. He jerks awake and sits up with one sharp roll of his shoulders and torso just in time for Dom to fly past him, go banging out onto the porch.

Arthur is on his feet before he knows what's going on, out the door with one foot on the grass as Dom power walks after Mal who is already halfway across the backyard, half running from him. He grabs her by the wrist when he catches her and she pulls up, body twisting like a snake's. He says, "Mal, please" and tries to touch her face. She gets her hand up and Arthur can't move forward or back. Just watches mutely as Mal stares at Dom for a few seconds, like she's not really sure of something. Then she wrings her wrist out of his fingers.

Arthur steps down. Hesitates and then starts to walk out toward them. Mal's gaze snaps to him over her husband's shoulder, and Dom turns. Stares at him like he doesn't know why Arthur's even there. It makes him slow down, stop. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing, go home."

Arthur looks straight over the line of Dom's shoulder to Mal. Back again. He doesn't move and doesn't know why, except a second later Cobb snaps. "We're done! Get out of here!" And Arthur can feel his shoulders come up and his back go tight, his jaw tighten and a muscle in his cheek twitch. Mal looks like she's going to cry and she can't look at him. He takes one step back, two, and then turns and goes back inside. He collects his jacket, hands shaking as he puts it back on. The suitcase isn't on the table anymore and he can't even think where they've put it, just that he has to leave. Has to get out because his chest is tight and it feels like he can't breathe, and when he turns to go Phillipa is standing just inside the room holding the doll he gave her for Christmas. She has a pair of scissors in her other hand. The doll doesn't have any hair left.

"Where's mommy?" she asks.

Arthur fights to get his other arm in the sleeve of his jacket and steps over to her. "Give me the scissors," is all he can say and at first she won't, so he pries them harshly out of her fingers and sets them up high on the kitchen counter where she can't reach. "Go play," he tells her, but can't bring himself to stay long enough to make sure she does.

It's still early enough that he doesn't have to turn on the lights when he gets back to his apartment, but he does anyway. His knuckles still hurt from gripping the steering wheel too hard. He'd driven around and around for an hour and a half, even though his apartment was maybe fifteen minutes from the Cobbs'. That had been the main reason he'd picked it. Otherwise he hadn't really cared where he lived as long as it had a roof and air conditioning. He realizes, suddenly, that he hates it. It's a cramped little place in a mid 80's building. Oddly shaped and badly designed. There's laminate in the kitchen and the area that is nominally the dining room has been re-appropriated as a second office area. He looks down at his shoes, nice Italian leather, and wonders what the hell they're doing standing on cheap beige carpet. His furniture is nice but nondescript, and he only has one painting; a landscape that Mal had given him hanging over his couch. The only pictures in the entire place are of Phillipa and James, held on the fridge by magnets for local Chinese and pizza places. It's clean because he doesn't really live in it. A woman comes by once a week to dust out the unused corners.

He wonders, vaguely, if he'll even be able to afford this place anymore. It isn't nice but it isn't cheap either. It's in a good area, close to roads and schools and the train. He doesn't really have stellar job opportunities, and his marketable skills consist mainly of doing what Mal and Dom can't. He supposes he could do the same thing for someone else, those Russians or the people in California who had given him impressed looks as he had explained advanced shared dreaming concepts to them. He doesn't really want to, though.

He knows he's selling himself short. He has a degree that, as he's been told many times, could open any damn door he wanted it to. He isn't going to starve, even if he wants to.

It's too early to sleep, even if his nerves hadn't been shot. He looks over at the clock on the microwave, then down at the watch on his wrist. He'd never reset the appliances for daylight savings time. Arthur turns back around and leaves the apartment, locks the door behind him.

There's a sports bar on the bottom floor of his complex. It is relatively quiet at 4pm on a Thursday. He sits at the far end of the bar and drinks Corona lazily from a bottle while the men at the other end stare, rapt, at the TV. Place bets, cheer and boo when appropriate. Backs are smacked and half of them are making terrible, terrible wagers. Arthur's fingers play with the neck of his bottle, running the numbers in his head. Then he drinks until he doesn't care.

When he gets back to his apartment, he opens the window but doesn't set his alarm. He figures it doesn't really matter. He sleeps in his clothes again.

At 10:30 he wakes up and pops a couple Advil. He smells like a bar and he needs to call some people, but can't figure out who. Instead he eats stale cereal out of a mug as he watches the news. Nothing's changed, and that's mildly surprising. At 11:20 his phone rings. He fishes it out of his pants pocket and stares at it for a second. It's Dom. Arthur runs through the reasons he could be calling, to officially fire him, maybe.

"Hello," he says.

"Arthur, you're late. I need you."

He stares at the tv, tries to feel something. He hadn't really been expecting Dom to apologize, anyway. He wants to ask what Dom wants. Instead he says, "Ok. I have to take a shower."

"Right. Can you pick up a pizza or something on the way over? There's nothing in the fridge."

"Yeah."

He hangs up and gets in the shower. He slicks his hair back and brushes his teeth and closes the window before he leaves.

Dom has them working on more paperwork, grant proposals. Arthur spends the afternoon fielding phone calls that don't matter while the suitcase sits on the low table in the living room and Dom limps through the second half of a paper he and Mal are supposed to be submitting to a scientific journal next month - a self imposed deadline. It's busy work, and Arthur can't figure out why, what happened yesterday when he was asleep on the couch. Mal's sick in bed; Dom told him when he got there, literally just said: "She's sick and doesn't want to give it to the baby," and that was it before they got to work.

They've eaten all the pizza and he's doing cleanup on his own notes. He's literally run out of things to do for the first time since he started working for the Cobbs, before he finally gets frustrated enough just to ask. Arthur sets his notebook down over his knees and twists around on the couch, hooks one elbow over the back and studies Dom who is sitting at the table. "Is there something wrong?"

Cobb looks at him like he's startled for a second - like he forgot he was there, or is uncertain of something. Then he says, "No, everything's fine Arthur," like he's talking to a child, which is maybe what makes Arthur persist.

"Is Mal alright?"

"She'll be fine in a couple of days," Cobb says, not looking at him. Keeps typing.

Arthur studies him from over the back of the couch, doesn't know what to say to say. Doesn't know how to ask 'What happened yesterday?' without seeming tactless. Without intruding. He can feel Cobb's patience fraying - like he's suddenly ten goddamn years old and too stupid, too young, too everything. He can't think of anything - not just to say, but to do with his hands, the notebook on his knees - so after a while, he just turns around and stares at his notes until he sees something he can do.

Later, he makes coffee because there isn't any in the pot. James and Phillipa are on the living room floor and Dom is sitting with them, his laptop on the coffee table with the word processor still open. He's counting off James' toes and smiling at his son who is laughing, laughing, laughing. Dom kisses his son's forehead. It's strange, a weird sense of familiarity - like when Mal went on that trip to Maryland to do a seminar a few months after James was born and it had been just Dom and the kids, Arthur ordering in take out and trying to work between bouts of baby James' screaming. Cobb clutching his son to his chest with one arm, trying to sway him to sleep and dictating to Arthur in a low melodical tone that's half scientific technicalities and half lullaby. Except Mal isn't in Maryland, she's asleep in the bedroom.

Arthur goes to use the bathroom and rolls the die in the sink basin. It lands exactly how he expects it to and, satisfied, he tucks it back in his pocket.

They work until six when Dom starts stealing glances at the clock. Arthur catches the hint, grabs his coat and says goodbye. Phillipa hugs his leg on the way out and he awkwardly pats her head before he shuts the door behind him. He walks down the driveway, gets in his car, and just sits there for five minutes. He still feels off balance. Remembers that there is $10,000 in his wallet and he hasn't told anyone yet. Arthur feels like he should be surprised he forgot, but he isn't really. When he gets home he eats an unappetizing instant burrito because it's the only thing left in his freezer before he goes to bed, sets his alarm, and sleeps the sleep of the dead.

The next morning he is strangely apprehensive as he lets himself in the Cobb's house. It is 8:30 and he is as well rested as he ever is, enough time to shower and eat breakfast and pay his bills before he left the apartment that he still doesn't like. Thinks maybe he is being dramatic as he heads down the hall to the study. Dom is sitting in the overstuffed arm chair and Mal is at her desk. He feels himself relax instantly. It's familiar. Dom looks up from the stack of papers on his lap, but he doesn't smile.

"Do you want some coffee or something? We're just going over the London files today."

Arthur blinks at him. They really do need to go over those; they'd been so excited over those couple of months that their notes are disorganized at best and more likely indecipherable. It needs to get done eventually, but it doesn't really need to get done now. And Dom has never been the one to suggest they do paperwork; that is almost solely Arthur's domain. He is almost certain that he was the only one of them that can read all three of their handwriting: his carefully formed print, Mal's elegant albeit sometimes rushed script, and Dom's hasty chicken scratch.

"I'm fine," he says.

Dom makes a noncommittal noise, waves his hand vaguely at the stack of papers on the desk that Arthur thinks of as his. Mal still hasn't looked up, her head resting in her left hand, her right on top of the papers in front of her, curled in slightly. She looks tired, like she's getting over a fever. Arthur puts himself in his chair and starts to work. It is very quiet. He can hear the old grandfather clock more clearly than he has since Phillipa was born. Arthur fingers the die in his pocket. Mal isn't singing quietly to herself in French. Dom isn't even making little frustrated noises as he wades through paperwork he finds dull and monotonous. The children aren't giggling or crying or running through the halls. He takes the die out of his pocket, rolls it across the table in plain sight. He can feel Dom's eyes on the back of his neck and Mal looks over at him finally, dark circles under her eyes and strangely blank.

"I'm going to go get some coffee," he says suddenly, getting up and walking into the kitchen. Dom follows him and watches him pour two dark, rich cups.

"The kids are with their grandparents. They went to the zoo," he says, like he is making an excuse.

"Oh," he pushes the mug to his right, lets Dom put as much sugar in as he wants.

Mal's exhausted and doesn't say anything all afternoon until late in the day when she gets up from her desk. She looks at the spread of papers under her fingers and Arthur can see the furrowed line of her brow, the markers of something like confusion at the corners of her mouth. She touches her forehead and looks over at her husband who is crouched over his own work, elbow planted and fingers tangled in his hair. "Dom, can't we please just stop?"

Dom puts his pen down. His sleeves are rolled up to his elbows. "Are you tired? Go take a nap, we can finish here. The kids'll be back soon."

There's a distinct flash of frustration, something tucked into Mal's eyes and the way her hands go loose, turn over, the backs of her hands on the table like she might ask for something. Like she might - Arthur doesn't know, but he glances between the two of them, pen slightly raised from his work to keep the ink from blotting.

"Alright," Mal says at last. She glances sideways, catches Arthur's eyes, and then gathers the sides of her red cardigan around her. She abandons her desk, disappears and doesn't come back before Arthur leaves for the day.

He doesn't realize what the difference is at first - maybe it's because she's recovering from being sick that Mal spends more time staring out the window than she does focusing on the stack of papers in front of her, absent, maybe a little feverish. One day he is on the back porch in the middle of the afternoon, eating lunch and wiping the dressing from his fingers on a cloth napkin. Watching Phillipa push her tiny brother around the backyard in a stroller shaped like a red and yellow car. James is making too much noise, but he can't tell if it's good noise or bad. Between the screeches, he can hear Mal whispering to Cobb just inside the door. Turns his head slightly and can see her hand on Dom's neck, her other fingers playing with the top button of his shirt absently while she says "Please, please just remember-" but he can't hear the rest.

The stroller tips over - hit's a rut in the turf or a small stone or something - and James sits in the overturned seat completely silent for a whole breath before he starts to scream in earnest. Phillipa is already trying to pull her brother out and making it worse just tugging at him by the arms. Cobb launches off the steps before Arthur can take his plate off his knees. Mal follows nearly ten steps behind him.

Cobb picks Phillipa up and places her straight back down a half step away. He unbuckles James and extracts him from the stroller, but that doesn't stop the boy from screaming. "Pick that up," Dom snaps. Phillipa rights the stroller automatically and steps immediately backwards.

Cobb is checking James' head for lumps, but Mal takes the little boy from him and puts him gently against her shoulder, the curve of her neck. "Oh," she states, patting his bottom. "There, you're fine. It's alright, you're not really hurt." It's the flat, frank way she says it that disturbs Arthur. Cobb is folding the stroller and isn't looking at his wife at all, tells Phillipa to go inside, but Arthur can't stop looking at the way Mal holds her son: bouncing him gently in her arms like she's counting the beats it takes instead of just trying to stop him from crying.

A few hours later as Arthur is gathering his things to go home, Dom says "See you tomorrow." Something about it makes Arthur realize that Mal hasn't said a single word to him all day. That she's still not really looking at him.

He looks straight at her. "Goodnight Mal."

She's startled. Looks up and straightens in her chair. "Goodnight Arthur," she says, the back of her pen wavering faintly against her bottom lip.

After that he starts mentally cataloging all the things about Mal that aren't right; that aren't her. The die rarely leaves his hand, pressed into his palm or rolled across the desk by one finger. The house is dreadfully quiet most days. Mal almost never talks, at least not when Arthur's around - like she's keeping a secret from him. Dom's voice is never enough to fill the gap. Even Phillipa is old enough to notice something isn't right, is quieter than usual. Arthur finds her under his feet more often. He thinks it might be because he's the only one acting normal; his silence is never unnatural.

They are chipping through their catalog of old work, transcribing their notes into digital format, shuffling bits and pieces around to make more sense; piecing together the puzzle of shared dreaming. Dom is acting like nothing is wrong, but his shoulders are a hard line and the corners of his mouth are turned down even when he's looking at Mal. Mal is constantly distracted. Arthur never thought he'd miss being forced into stilted conversation, but he does. Talks to her sometimes and can't miss the way she only half listens, like she doesn't really care what he's going to say. Mal had always had the ability to make you feel as if you were the only one in the room, that focus was solely on you. He sometimes thought that it was the reason Dom loved her so much. One of them, at least. He tries not to feel hurt. It's childish, younger than he's ever been.

He is staring at a receipt that has a note scribbled on the back, it says: 2.3- Important! Remember Dresden!. It is placed on top of another piece of paper about how far you can push a dream before it becomes too wrong for the dreamers to accept easily. It is in Dom's handwriting and Arthur has no idea what it means. Mal and Dom are in the kitchen making lunch, sandwiches all around. He pushes his chair in before he walks to the kitchen, squinting at a line written sideways on the random limit note. His loafers don't make any noise on the carpet, so he can hear Mal clearly.

"It's blue Dom," she says. Her voice is pleading.

"Yes, it's blue," Dom says. His voice is tense, confused and frustrated.

"You don't understand," Mal says as Arthur walks in. She's holding a blue pen in her hand. They both look over to him, heads turned to the side. The silence is deafening.

"Remember Dresden," Arthur says finally. It's enough to snap Dom out of it. He runs his fingers through his hair and looks at the ceiling for a moment.

"The limitations on design? Jameson re-created Dresden from before the bombing, and put a man who'd lived in post-war Dresden his whole life in it. Then he moved the city forward to what it would be had it never been destroyed. The dream collapsed."

Arthur doesn't know what he's saying, isn't really paying attention, because Mal is looking out the window, her eyes sad.

"It's somewhere else in the notes I think," Dom adds, a little lamely, "It's not important."

Arthur carefully creases the receipt and tosses it in the trash as he passes. Sits back at his desk and goes back to work.

Three days later Mal is sitting at her desk, not working again and staring out the window. She's wearing a shawl and her hair and makeup are perfect, even though they are in a heat wave. She is wearing heels. Dom is giving James a bath and Phillipa is 'helping.' Arthur hears a high pitched giggle from the bathroom and Dom's deep laugh.

"It's too hot," Mal says.

Arthur looks up at her, surprised she's talking to him. He glances out the window to see the sky is clear and blue, hazy with heat and humidity, "Yeah, it's supposed to break by this weekend," he says, parroting something he heard on the radio that morning.

She doesn't look at him, just shakes her head and clutches at the shawl, "No. It's not supposed to be this warm."

Arthur just looks at her, forehead creased and frowning. He doesn't know what to say.

By the next week the heat has broken and the temperature is bearable. Phillipa and James are allowed to play outside again and Dom has put some sort of embargo on actual work. They are sitting on the porch, watching Phillipa splash around in her little pool decorated with sea turtles and friendly dolphins. James is in the grass with a soft-edged plastic truck, crayon bright and ridiculous. Dom is drinking lemonade and leaning forward on his elbows, smiling the way he only does for his children. Arthur flips through a journal article about the impossibility of inception; the researcher is heavily referencing them and he is making sure they aren't being misrepresented. There is a pencil tucked behind his ear. Mal is sitting back in a deck chair, slouching. Her arms are crossed over her stomach. Arthur sighs, taps his fingers on the front of the article, bored out of his mind. It's pretty outdated, reminding everyone of things they already know. He closes the magazine, his fingers splayed across the cover, and figures that no one is going to read it, anyway. Mal looks over at him, rolls her head on her shoulders and stares at him. He feels her gaze instantly, looks back at her.

"I miss you," she says suddenly.

Arthur feels his expression twist into something he's not sure he'd recognize if he saw.

"I miss you too," he hears himself say. He doesn't know why. Dom's glass clinks on the deck.

Mal smiles at him, sad and tired, says, "I know."

That night Dom pulls him aside, says to him, "I need to talk to you."

Arthur just looks at him.

Dom walks him out to his car, makes sure that the front door is shut behind him, and all Arthur can hear is a buzzing and the sound of their shoes on the gravel driveway. He unlocks his car. Lights flash. The alarm disarms with a mild 'ba-woop' and they stand next to the driver's side door as Arthur slowly turns his keys around their ring, gentle scrape of metal on metal.

"-When you were in California we did more testing. And when you got back-," Dom is saying. His voice sounds far away, eaten up by the darkness. "Mal wanted to let you sleep." They had protocols. They had rules, and none of that matters because Cobb is talking about layers, about diving down into the dream further and further until time stretched out like a corridor of mirrors, until the dream fractured away from them. He says, "We were there a long time."

Arthur asks, automatic, "How long?"

He studies Cobb; he looks old and tired, his face cut up by the porch light. He doesn't really need an answer, but he wants to know anyway. It's bizarre how some part of him is simultaneously terrified, wants to punch Cobb in the nose for breaking their rules and the rest of him is just freakishly glad that someone is telling him something.

"Longer than we should have been," is what Dom tells him but Arthur just stares at him, all sensible, inflexible math and a desperate longing for something numerical, so Dom revises: "Fifty, maybe sixty years." A trembling pause. They're standing too close but Arthur feels anything but claustrophobic. One of Dom's hands comes up like he might touch Arthur's sleeve, but then he drops it again and just says, tight but not uncertain: "She's having a hard time coming back from it."

Which is understandable, makes all kinds of sense; of course she is. Anyone would. Cobb is standing there like he's waiting for Arthur to say something. A beat, and then he steps back. "I thought you should know. Anyway, see you tomorrow." Dom starts to walk around the front of the car.

"Dom," Arthur calls, the sound of his voice peaking uncomfortably in the darkness. Cobb turns to look mid-stride, doesn't quite stop his forward momentum entirely. Arthur has his keys tight in his fist, the ridges probably leaving marks on his palm. He says, "Thank you."

He shrugs and waves, shakes his head. "Tomorrow," he reminds him, and goes back inside.

Arthur breathes out, clicks the alarm on the key chain again to make sure it doesn't go off when he opens the door. He starts the car and pulls away, and it makes no sense but he suddenly feels like he can breath again after weeks of being smothered. Like he's woken up. He laughs, one stifled bark of relief, between the Cobbs' house and his apartment. He'll stay up all night on his computer doing what counts for research, but right then all he knows is a bewildering streak of thankfulness that he hasn't done something wrong.

He's good at fact checking, about running the numbers and doing research and making the logical choice, and even if Mal's situation seems to fluctuate from day to day Arthur at least now feels like he has some foothold on the whole ordeal. It's makes it mildly easier to deal with. He brings Mal coffee and doesn't feel the pang in his chest when she barely touches it. It takes him a week of cross-referencing, getting a variety of opinions, and then he waits until Dom goes to put the kids to sleep before he pulls a card out of his wallet. He puts his coffee mug down and unfolds himself from the chair, takes the five steps to Mal's workspace and carefully puts it on the corner of her desk.

She looks at the card first. Reads it. Looks up to his face. She regards him seriously, but her shoulders are still loose, her fingers easy around her pencil. There is a drawing of a perfect, beautiful tower in the margin of the research notes under her elbow. It's the first thing Arthur can remember seeing her design since before he left for California.

"I think you should see someone," he says - doesn't know how to ease into it, so he just doesn't. "I did the research. He's supposed to be good."

Mal turns her pencil over and drags the card over from the edge with the eraser. She's quiet for a moment, a distant look in her eyes - not quite looking at the card itself. "Yes, I think you're right," she says. "That's a good idea."

Arthur feels an instant pang of relief - like her acceptance will fix everything. And it almost seems to. The three of them go back to work, and she smiles more often and holds her children a little closer. She still isn't quite herself; quieter and prone to staring out the windows. Her smile is still a little crooked. But Arthur puts it all down to the fact that she's older. People change and she had a lot of time to do so. He must seem like a stranger to her, too. He tries to imagine what it would be like not to see the Cobbs' for fifty years and he can't. That makes him wonder what the hell he's doing with his life. But he doesn't really care. Things are almost better.

The mood is relaxed enough that Cobb starts to talk to him about the dream under the dream. He calls it Limbo. He explains that it's like the purest state of a dream as he picks a sleeping Phillipa off the floor, that time moves even slower. Your subconscious can't kick you out, and the only things there are what you bring with you. Enough time has passed that whatever it is that drives him to discovery finds it fascinating. He describes the things you can build, the ease of creation and destruction as Arthur follows him into his daughter's bedroom.

"It's like being a god," he says as he tucks her in.

Arthur thinks that Dom isn't saying what he means, exactly. There is an edge of something else in his voice when he tells Arthur they have to publish what they've learned. Like a warning to everyone else who is trying to go further: here there be dragons. Arthur moves between almost irrationally angry to serenely forgiving with a fluidity that surprises him. He is angry that they went without him, angry they lied, angry they pushed so hard. And then he's just glad they're back. That they're relatively intact. That things are getting back to normal.

They are working on cutting edge research, the newest facet of shared dreaming. There are stacks of old notes that Arthur knows he will have to finish going over later, but that Dom feels no pressing urge to address now. The backlog is almost a comfort.

xxx

It is a week before Dom and Mal's anniversary, and they are nearly done writing what they know about Limbo. Dom does most of the writing, feeds ideas to Arthur so that he can streamline them and keep them organized. Mal contributes here and there and does large technical drawings of the places they made. They are in talks with a handful of scientific journals. Arthur is calling people and can hear excitement in their voices when he talks about what they are doing. The Cobbs have something new to show the world. There is only one part left to write.

"How did you get back?" he asks, tactless and sudden. The three of them are sitting at counter in the kitchen, stools pulled in close. The kids are asleep. There is a pile of papers between them, the physical manifestation of their work.

Mal looks at him dreamily, says, "We killed ourselves."

Cobb clears his throat as Arthur's fingers draw in tight, "It's like a kick, wakes you up instantly."

"You knew that?" he doesn't really want to know, but he thinks he needs to. His fingernails are digging into his palms.

"I was pretty sure," Dom answers, and something in his voice, in the shift of his expression, stops whatever anger Arthur might have felt. Mal looks away, out the back porch window where the sprinkler taps against the glass. She is barefoot and there is a softness around her eyes.

"It didn't matter," she says. Dom looks over at her and smiles, and he loves her. Arthur feels like he's intruding, and wonders if he will ever, ever stop feeling that way.

xxx

It's been so long that the IV stings when it goes into his wrist, flesh tender. Arthur flexes his fingers as he lays himself out on the couch. Mal on the settee, Dom on the chair. Phillipa and James are getting ice cream with their grandfather and the quiet in the house is strangely pleasant. Arthur lays back into the crisp throw pillow, one foot on the ground to steady himself. He can feel the tingle of anticipation in his fingers, the length of his spine. Dom reaches over and hits the release. There's nothing, and then there's everything.

Mal's design opens up under his feet like a pop-up book, unfolding in arches and glass spirals and the smooth curve of staircases that sprout from the grassy ground like sculpture instead of buildings. The work itself is immaterial - it's nothing more than fact checking that they've technically already done. Running their numbers again just in case. They finish early and go walking across a flood plain, water over glassy marble that reflects the sky. It feels good despite the surrealist nature. Arthur doesn't touch the die in his pocket a single time, just follows a few steps behind Mal and Dom with his eyes half closed, feeling the breeze on his face. Dom has his arm around Mal's shoulders, is saying something in her ear that makes her laugh. It doesn't even matter that he's behind them - Arthur can feel himself smiling. The sound is rich and easy and lovely.

When they wake up, Arthur helps record the minimal data they've collected, packs away the PASIV unit and gathers his coat. He's shrugging it on as Mal comes over, kisses him on the cheek and smiles at him. "See you soon," she says and there is a pleasant heat which burns low in his chest.

"Have a good weekend," he wishes them.

xxx

The buzzing of his cellphone on his bedside table wakes him. He answers it. Doesn't immediately recognize what the person on the other end of the line is saying. Arthur looks at his alarm clock but barely registers the number before it ticks over to the next minute. "What?" he rasps, juggling the phone to his other ear. He can't be bothered to sit up.

"-have to go and wanted to know if you could watch the children."

Arthur blinks a couple of times, sits up. "I'm sorry, what happened?"

Mal's father is talking to him. It's four-thirty-two in the morning, Sunday. "Mal's dead and they have Dom down at the station. We have to go and wanted to know if you could go be there if Phillipa and James wake up." The second time he says it is steadier, harder.

Arthur can't feel his fingers.

"Hello?" Miles is asking.

"Sorry. Yes, I just need to get dressed. I'll be over. Sorry."

He puts his clothes on. He puts his shoes on. He locks his apartment door. He drives to the Cobbs' house and meets Mal's parents in the driveway. The kids are asleep, they say, which is the extent of the conversation before he's watching the car's tail lights turn off from the end of the driveway. He goes and sits in the living room and he waits. The suitcase is on the dining room table, right where he left it two days ago.

The sun starts to peek over the horizon and he realizes he's watching it closer than he ever has. The sky goes blue to green to orange and he can't remember if that's the way it's supposed to go. He can't remember the sky ever really being that exact color. It should be more pink, he thinks. His hand has been in his pocket since he left the apartment, the die is as warm as his body when he fishes it out. He holds it, looks back at the briefcase, then at the sunrise. It's slow. Too slow. The die is in his hand and he just has to roll it. He can't. He can't because if he does it will be—

His presses his hand to his forehead and the edge of the die is digging into his skin. Outside the birds start singing, brief chirps and long calls, and they sound louder than they should, he's sure of it. He can't remember waking up. He just remembers the phone. And the sky isn't nearly the right color. He can hear himself breathing and that's too loud, too. They wouldn't have left the suitcase out. Phillipa's hands can reach the tops of tables, now. He slides his palm up, just a little, the die rolls and he can feel the single divot on its surface, directly in the center of his forehead, like a bullseye. Bang, one shot and you're awake.

He stays like that until the sun streaks through the big bay window, traces a line across the carpet and up the leg of the chair, over the toe of his shoe. He takes his hand off his forehead and stares at his palm. Feels the weight of the cheat in his hand. It doesn't feel right.

He doesn't roll it until he hears a car crunch up the driveway, is standing up before he sees it fall, at the door before it opens. Miles and his wife look exhausted, dark circles under their eyes and Mal's mother has mascara running down her face, tracing the wrinkles in her face. She is small and dark like her daughter. She walks past him without saying anything, into the baby's room and closes the door. Miles is left standing there; he looks unsure. Arthur has never seen him that way. His eyes meet Arthur's and he says, like he is talking about the weather, "She killed herself."

Arthur is just looking at him, because he can't do anything else.

Miles sniffs once, and his fingers are restless at his sides, "She jumped out the window. The cops think that Dom might have-"

Arthur has taken one step back before he realizes it.

"He says that she thought it was a dream," Arthur turns around before he has a chance to finish. His shoes make clicking sounds on the wood floor as he turns into the living room. The die is on the table where he left it. It says, bang, bullseye.

Arthur is still standing there, staring at it when Miles comes in behind him.

"She told him that she gave a letter to her attorney," Miles is telling him this because he expects Arthur to do something about it, "It says that Dom killed her. It says he is a danger to his children."

Arthur doesn't look at him, answers automatically, "She wasn't well." It sounds like something he heard in a movie. People don't talk like that. "She had-," he clears his throat again, "She was seeing someone."

Arthur breathes in.

"They can't hold Dom, they're questioning him but they have to let him out today. He didn't-" and whatever Miles meant to say he can't seem to finish. He just stands there next to Arthur and waits.

Arthur walks past the table. He knows the Cobbs' bank account information. He knows their social security numbers and the children's. He files their taxes for them. It takes him less than five minutes to find Mal's credit card statement. To find a name he recognizes on the list. It's the same name he handed to her on a card, not a month ago. It is the first of four names he recognizes from his research. All of them are well respected.

Mal was smart. So smart.

Arthur doesn't wait for Dom to get home. He snatches the loaded die off the table, and he drives back to the apartment. He makes a lot of phone calls, juggling business cards until they're all over the floor of the car, somehow manages to follow every traffic law on the way back - even uses his headset instead of talking straight into the phone. He cleans out his car when he parks, takes all the papers out of the backseat and the milk crate of files out of the trunk and drags them upstairs. His alarm clock hasn't gone off yet. He resets it and then puts his phone back to his ear as he sorts papers. It's Sunday, impossible to get hold of the people who might matter and even if he does they won't talk to him - confidentiality, something - he doesn't leave messages as he makes piles of papers and files and loose note cards. It isn't until he's done, sitting at the table with ordered stacks of research according to subject, lined up by date - heavy duty rubber bands and alligator clips - that he stops long enough to think about what he can do with it. He makes another phone call, long distance. A women answers in German.

"Hello, I'd like to leave a message for Doctor Van De Berg."

There is a suitcase at the top of his closet which he fills with clothes, his toothbrush, a comb and razor. He packs the few files he has on inception - old notes on the sleep trials that he should have cataloged already, but hasn't since they were more than useless. Something that won't matter, that he can share guiltlessly between colleagues under the pretense of joint research, second opinions, an excuse to be overseas. He books a flight to Stuttgart for the following afternoon.

When he's done everything he can think of doing, he sits and eats takeout rice that's been in the fridge for too long while watching the news. He waits for something and it never comes. Arthur falls asleep in the chair. Wakes up a few hours later and realizes it's dark out, that the TV is still on. He lowers the volume but doesn't turn it off before stumbling to his bedroom. He's still wearing his shoes and takes them off before laying down. He spends an hour in just the darkness, listening to the hum of early evening traffic. He can feel the die in his pocket; just the right weight.

He eats a solid breakfast in the morning, ignores the pit in his stomach as he stands in the center of the kitchen. The dishes are washed by hand to waste time. He fills out the slip of paper to have his mail rerouted to his mother's, and by the time he's done with that it's time to go.

The apartment is cheap. Ugly carpet, pragmatic furniture. It feels nothing like home and he's stripped it of everything he cares to take with him - which doesn't amount to much, not really. Arthur can't bring himself to mind, never liked the apartment anyway and now he has a checklist to accomplish. Things to do. Later, he might think about the fact that his landlord could liquidate all his furniture, parse away everything he's owned when he suddenly stops paying his rent. That the extra files on the table, which are excerpts from the passage of more than three years of work but ultimately nothing vitally important, will either rot on a shelf in an evidence locker or - more likely - be thrown away. For now, Arthur simply picks up his suitcase and his briefcase and goes.

He stops at the bank to cash the $10,000 check in his wallet, puts the money in a small, neat stack in the bottom of the briefcase and locks it. He goes to the airport where he books a ticket from New York City to Paris in Dom's name, pays in cash. Then he goes to Cobb's attorney. He tells him that if something goes wrong- and lets the lawyer draw his own conclusions, gives him the plane ticket and trusts him to do what's right. He doesn't call the Cobbs' house - Dom's house- who knows who's house now - until he's through airport security. Miles answers the phone, which isn't unexpected.

"I've gone to Stuttgart like we had planned," Arthur tells him as he puts his shoes back on, briefcase in hand. "Let Dom know." There's silence on the line for a long time. "Please-" And Arthur stutters for maybe the first time in his life. He's standing in the middle of the terminal at JFK which is made of glass and steel and polished floors and smooth, unending curves of stairs which remind him of dreaming. It hits him; he sways where he stands and clears his throat, reevaluating his grip on the briefcase handle. "Miles, please tell him. Tell him I hope I don't see him in the café at 59 Rue de Cernay."

The flight from New York to Stuttgart takes ten and a half hours, but it's not a straight shot. Eight hours to Frankfurt, ignoring the movie playing on the seat back in front of him. He is flying business class because he can afford to and because he doesn't want to fall victim to well intentioned small talk with whatever tourist he might otherwise have ended up sitting next to. He briefly goes through his notes and rearranges the research, unnecessarily, before his body goes into automatic; years of travel experience allow him to fall asleep even though he isn't tired. He doesn't think about whether or not Dom has told his children that their mother is dead.

When they land in Frankfurt he has lost a day, or gained some hours depending on how you look at it. It's 2am and the entire airport is hushed. Only one of the international chains in the food court is open, serving coffee and scones. The place still smells of yesterday's bratwurst and fries. Chips. He watches a small child push a toy car across the carpet between the seats where passengers wait for their flights.

At four his plane prepares for boarding and he and his briefcase load themselves back into their proper compartments. The flight only lasts forty minutes, and during the last ten he feels inexplicably tired. They land and the Captain welcomes them to Stuttgart in German. It's barely five o'clock when he danke schon and entschuldigung's his way out of the airport, onto the street where he hails a taxi.

His meeting with Van De Berg is scheduled for ten. He expects it will turn into lunch. They will make small talk and Arthur will give the man research he probably doesn't even want anymore, but which he will take anyway. Before that he stops at the train station, buys a ticket, one way to Paris. The train leaves at 2pm. Arthur has the cabbie take him to a breakfast place he remembered liking when the three of them had attended a conference on shared sleep hosted by Van De Berg's parent company. He has a cup of coffee and pokes at his eggs while he calls everyone he can think of from the shadier side of his business. He isn't actively calling in favors yet, just reminding them that they exist. Re-forming old connections and testing the waters with people who may or may not be willing to help him, for money or for favors. The sun has risen hot and heavy over the streets of Stuttgart when he wraps up his last call and hails another cab.

The meeting with Van De Berg means nothing. Arthur is essentially just handing over research notes, bits and pieces of things they learned studying inception. Van De Berg makes awkward small talk in English and seems to appreciate Arthur's short, concise responses. They end up having lunch as Van De Berg explains his newest research. He wants to look into the commercial applications of shared dreaming, he explains. His hands are doing most of the talking. The most beautiful resorts you've ever seen. Arthur smiles wanly, doesn't point out that the dream is addictive, that the side effects are permanent. He isn't really surprised that this is where things are heading. Despite Dom's casual dismissal, all scientific discovery loops back to profit margins.

"And how is the Mrs. Cobb," Van De Berg asks, conversational tone as he picks something out of his salad, "she is doing well, as beautiful as always I am guessing," he continues, laughs.

Arthur is staring down at his plate, "I'm sorry," he says, "she died recently."

"Oh," Van De Berg looks up at him, surprised, "I am sorry, I did not know," his words run off into platitudes.

"It is ok," Arthur says, even though it isn't, "it is very recent."

He looks at his watch. It is nearly 1pm. "Forgive me, but I am afraid I have a train to catch."

"I have insulted you," Van De Berg says. The doctor sounds upset and Arthur can't understand that. He hasn't sounded really upset since it happened. He hasn't cried. He and Mal practically lived in each other's pockets for more than three years. Wonders if there's something wrong with him because he didn't cry for his father either. But strangers, strangers did, so easily.

"No, not at all. I am meeting a business associate in France and I can't leave him waiting. Please, excuse me. I look forward to our next meeting," he says. It's fluid and businesslike. They shake hands and he makes it to the train station with plenty of time to spare.

The ride is uneventful, scenery passing by almost too fast to really enjoy had he even been in the mood. His hand is in his pocket and the briefcase is on the seat next to him. He has called ahead to the hotel, makes sure there are vacancies because he cannot make a reservation. The clerk gives him a sideways look when he pays in cash, but he does something uncharacteristic and smiles charmingly at her until whatever apprehension she felt melted away. He thanks her in broken French, lets his fingers slide across hers as he takes his room key. She is blushing when he walks towards the elevator.

It is barely late enough to be considered evening when he hangs his jacket in the closet of the room. The place is nice, sugar-white and clean but not sterile. Inviting, with warm wood accents and a soft yellow glow from the incandescent bulbs. He washes his face over the pedestal sink in the bathroom, looks at himself in the mirror for as long as he can bear before lying down on the bed, on top of the blankets with shoes still on. He stares at the ceiling and thinks he's being an idiot. Mal was lying. She wouldn't really do that. Couldn't. She just said it because she was sick, so that Dom would take her seriously. She saw a few different doctors because she didn't like what they had to say, obviously. She was delusional. He rolls the die in between his thumb and forefinger. She was very sick. There was nothing they could do. By this time tomorrow he'll be on a flight back to California. He will have to change his mailing address again and maybe find a new apartment. One he likes. He wonders if Dom will keep his house or move somewhere else where the memories of his wife aren't painted on the walls and buried in the floors.

But he's overreacting, he knows. Playing out the worst possible scenario in his head. As if anyone could believe Dom killed his wife. Like he could look at her with so much love and kill her anyway. It was laughable. And she was very sick. Next week he'll have to put the money from the briefcase into a savings account. Maybe he could slip it into Phillipa and James's college funds when Dom wasn't looking. Things would be...

Not fine. He knows that. But not as bad as they could be. Dom won't lose his children and Arthur won't lose—

He puts the die back in his pocket, sits up and sets the alarm clock for 6am, takes off his shoes and his socks and pulls the sheets back. Lays there until he falls asleep, and it is never as easy as it is on the couch in the living room of a house that doesn't belong to him.

xxx

It is 7:45 and Arthur is sitting at an outdoor table in front of a cafe. Bicycles whirr by and there is a pair of backpackers sitting with their bags between their feet, circling names on a big map stretched between them. He knows that Dom won't be here. He's making plans for the future, a piece of him casually wondering how many dreamers can share one space before the whole thing overloads and collapses. How Van De Berg plans to make resorts more meaningful than an overly vivid but ultimately simple dreamscape. His fingers drum out a song he half remembers on the crisp white table cloth.

The coffee he is nursing is dark and rich. His cheek is resting on his left hand as he studies a brochure he found in the lobby of his hotel, the die holding down one of the flaps. He thinks he knows why he isn't upset. Like with his father, who he hadn't missed since he knew him as a man instead of as a myth, he said goodbye to her a long time ago: on a warm afternoon, sitting on the back porch as Dom played in the grass with his children, his back to Arthur and Mal, the air sweet and fresh and vibrant. And even before that, Mal's hand on his back, telling him to lay down so she and Cobb could get to the work they'd always wanted to do.

It's pleasantly warm and smells faintly like every other city in the world, which is an odd kind of comfort. It's isn't until he hears the chair across from him slide out from under the table that he realizes with startling clarity that he isn't as different from his father as he thought.

Arthur looks up as Cobb sits down. Cobb doesn't order anything, doesn't even look at the menu, and the world - with all its labyrinth complexities - narrows to this point. Arthur has put it all on the long shot.

* * *

**Authors' Notes from prosodi and beatu_fu:**

Special thanks to basically the entire internet for putting up with our considerable freaking out over this fic. Bashed out in a little under six days, this is probably one of the more rewarding fic writing experiences of my life, etc. Inspired solely by the fact that we think Arthur is awesome, and the concept that if he knew Mal, then he knew Cobb before Cobb was on the run (and that, kind of as a result of that, Arthur had to have made an effort to follow Cobb into life as a career criminal). We kind of let that idea fester and grow and carry us away to a magical kingdom that may or may not work, but was nonetheless insanely fun to write. For what it's worth, thank you so much for reading and sharing this magical adventure with beat_fu and I.

Arthur holds up the die; he knows its exact weight, the way it will fall. He always thought he was a good gambler.


End file.
